BiblioVault - Books about Translations into English

Kabuki

Five Classic Plays

James R. Brandon

Harvard University Press, 1975

The Kannada Mahabharata

Kumaravyasa

Harvard University Press, 2024

The classic Kannada version of the Mahabharata, a jewel of world literature, translated into English.

The Mahabharata, a cornerstone of ancient Indian literature, recounts the rivalry between branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, culminating in a cataclysmic war. It has inspired numerous adaptations across languages and artistic media.

The Kannada Mahabharata, known as Kumāravyāsa Bhārata, is an innovative retelling where Krishna occupies center stage, composed by the fifteenth-century poet Kumaravyasa. His powerful verses critique kingship and caste and remain popular in musical performances and improvisational folk theatre today.

Volume 1 comprises “The Book of Beginnings” and “The Book of the Assembly,” including Pandu’s tragic death, the marriage of the Pandavas to Draupadi, Arjuna’s fiery destruction of the Khandava forest, the slaying of King Shishupala, and the dice game plotted by the Kauravas leading to the Pandavas’s exile.

This edition, which abridges the Kannada classic, presents a new English translation and the most reliable text of the original in the Kannada script.

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The King of Time

Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian

Velimir Khlebnikov

Harvard University Press, 1985

Velimir Khlebnikov, who died in 1922 at the age of thirty-six, is one of the great, untranslated Russian poets of this century. Hailed by his contemporaries and by later writers and scholars as the creative genius behind the Russian Futurist movement, Khlebnikov is famous more for his inaccessibility than for the excellence of what he actually produced. Even Russians are generally baffled by him.

Now, in a powerful American rendition, we are given access to the strange and beautiful world of Khlebnikov, “the word’s wild highwayman.” Trained in the natural sciences and mathematics and by temperament an artist, Khlebnikov thought he had discovered the Laws of Time and Tables of Destiny, by which enlightened humans could live in harmony with themselves and with nature. He coined the terms “Futurian” and “Presidents of Planet Earth” for himself and his friends, and he devoted all of his short, restless life to finding a language appropriate to his vision. Experiments with words became magical paths to a reinvigorated future, and produced some of the most extraordinary poems in the Russian language.

These goals and researches were variously embodied as well in stories, plays, and visionary essays in which Khlebnikov advances architectural plans for mobile cities, a new alphabet based on universal meanings of sounds, and communication by way of vast television networks. The result is poetry of startling originality, modernity, and linguistic virtuosity—a true challenge to translators and one that has been met brilliantly here by Paul Schmidt and Charlotte Douglas.

The King of Time is a representative sampling of Khlebnikov’s writings, taken from the translation of his complete works prepared under the auspices of the Dia Art Foundation. It includes many pieces, among them the full text of the astounding poem-play Zangezi, never before translated. General readers will be introduced to the legendary Khlebnikov, and cognoscenti will applaud the inventiveness of the rendering.

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Knut Hamsun Remembers America

Essays and Stories, 1885-1949

Knut Hamsun, Translated and Edited by Richard Nelson Current

University of Missouri Press, 2003

When Americans remember him at all, they no doubt think of Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) as the author of Hunger or as the Norwegian who, along with Vidkun Quisling, betrayed his country by supporting the Nazis during World War II. Yet Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1920 for his novel The Growth of the Soil, was and remains one of the most important and influential novelists of his time. Knut Hamsun Remembers America is a collection of thirteen essays and stories based largely on Hamsun’s experiences during the four years he spent in the United States when he was a young man. Most of these pieces have never been published before in an English translation, and none are readily available.

Hamsun’s feelings about America and American ways were complex. For the most part, they were more negative than positive, and they found expression in many of his writings—directly in his reminiscences and indirectly in his fiction. In On the Cultural Life of Modern America, his first major book, he portrayed the United States as a land of gross and greedy materialism, populated by illiterates who were utterly lacking in artistic originality or refinement. Although the pieces in this collection are not all anti-American, most of them emphasize the strangeness and unpleasantness, as the author saw it, of life in what he called Yankeeland.

Arranged chronologically, the pieces fall into three categories: Critical Reporting, Memory and Fantasy, and Mellow Reminiscence. The Critical Reporting section includes articles that appeared in Norwegian or Danish newspapers soon after each of Hamsun’s two visits to America and that give his views on a variety of American subjects, and includes an essay devoted to Mark Twain. Memory and Fantasy comprises narratives of life in America, most of which are presented as personal experiences but which actually are blends of fact and fiction. Mellow Reminiscence includes later and fonder recollections and impressions of the United States.

The pieces in this collection provide variations on a theme that runs through much of American history—European criticism of American ways. They give vivid, at times distorted, pictures of life as it was in the United States. They tell us something about the development of the worldview of a man who became a great writer, only to jeopardize his reputation by defending the Nazi oppressors of his own people. Knut Hamsun Remembers America will appeal to anyone interested in the history of American civilization or, more specifically, in the history of anti-Americanism.

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